the three corporate objectives: growth, profitability, and pain avoidance

Paul Krugman quotes Charlie Stross in 2010:
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.*

“I like it; it’s fun (although William Gibson said much the same thing, I think); but it’s so 1960s, if you know what I mean. … That was then.

“These days, we’re living in the world of the imperial, very self-interested individual; the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the man in the very expensive Armani suit.”

—Paul Krugman*


20210210T2054−08*
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*

Posted

trees: words by Herman Hesse

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them …

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. …

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.*



20210131T2056−08*
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*



Posted

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

a video embedded in an article on Marcel Proust*

the title of this post – What is your idea of perfect happiness? – is the first item in the Proust Questionnaire (!?)

what follows is in response to that question

wanting anything is dukkha

wanting nothing is nirvana

wanting nothing other than that none want
anything more than needed
to be and let be, to live and let live,
with love, compassion, joy, and equanimity
is still wanting something, is still dukkha

that said,

anyone can balance dukkha with equanimity  
in this moment, the ever-changing present

with appamāda


20210125T1157−08*
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*

phrases shown with links:

Read more »

Posted